Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (10 page)

More than two hundred of these “spells” were found in the tomb of King Unas, but more than eight hundred others have been discovered since in other tombs dating from this early period. The vast pantheon of Egyptian gods is hinted at by the fact that more than two hundred different gods are mentioned in the various Pyramid Texts. Although once reserved for kings, Pyramid Texts began to appear in the tombs of non-royalty by the end of the Old Kingdom’s Sixth Dynasty, suggesting a fundamental change in Egyptian society that might explain the disorder that sent the Old Kingdom into decline.

Over time, the Egyptian obsession with preparing properly for the afterlife produced ornate coffins painted with hymns and requests to the gods in another collection of spells, known as
Coffin Texts
. This is the modern name for a collection of more than eleven hundred spells and recitations, some of them similar to versions from the Pyramid Texts, which were painted on wooden coffins. Some of these texts included maps showing the safest route for the soul to take as the dead person negotiated the treacherous path through the underworld.

The last—and perhaps best known—form of burial literature is another collection, which was misnamed
The Book of the Dead
when it was discovered and translated in the nineteenth century CE. Used for more than a thousand years, The Book of the Dead, known to the Egyptians as “The Book of Coming Forth by Day,” was a New Kingdom innovation, consisting of almost two hundred spells or formulas designed to assist the spirits of the dead achieve and maintain a full and happy afterlife. These spells had such titles as “For Going Out Into the Day and Living After Death,” “For Passing by the Dangerous Coil of Apep” (Apep was a terrible serpent in Egyptian mythology), or advice with the ring of a “Hint from Heloise”—” For Removing Anger From the Heart of the God.” Another provided the incantation for preventing a man’s decapitation in the realm of the dead:

“I am a Great One, the son of a Great One. I am a flame, the son of a flame to whom was given his head after it had been cut off. The head of Osiris shall not be taken from him, and my head shall not be taken from me. I am knit together, just and young, for I indeed am Osiris, the Lord of Eternity.”

At one time, these spells and rituals had been for the exclusive use of the pharaohs. But The Book of the Dead became everyman’s chance at eternity, and copies of it eventually came to be buried with any Egyptian who could afford one. (See below,
What was the “weighing of the heart”?)

The many centuries of burials, tombs, temples, palaces, monuments, and statuary left behind by the Egyptians—all with elaborately carved accounts of kings, extolling their achievements—constitute a rough form of the first recorded history. This awesome collection of antiquities documents an Egypt which had a highly developed, unique mythology more than five thousand years ago. This vast record shows that the Egyptians believed from the earliest times that the gods had a profound impact on the shaping of their world and civilization. But the focal point of this complex religion evolved into a near obsession with life after death.

Long before Christianity and its hope of resurrection was born, Egyptian religion was the first to conceive of life after death. At the heart of this religion—and at the center of Egyptian government and society itself—were Egypt’s extraordinary gods, a pantheon of breathtaking imagination and totality that found expression in every aspect of the Creation—animal, human, plant, and stone. The beginnings of Egyptian mythology and the elaborate stories of these gods go far back in time, before history, to the time when the first Egyptians imagined Creation.

How does “creation by masturbation” work?

In the Book of Genesis, the Hebrew Bible offers two versions of the Creation. The first is the Seven Day account, in which God speaks and creates the universe. The second tells the story of Adam and Eve and is set in the Garden of Eden. These two biblical accounts differ substantially in details, facts, and style. They were probably composed centuries apart and only merged later on by the early Jewish editors who first compiled the writings that would become the Books of Moses, or the first five books of the Bible. But these two separate and distinct stories have been viewed as one by Jews and Christians for centuries. Raised on a Sunday-school or Hollywood version of biblical events, and not having read the Bible for themselves, many people are not even aware of the fact that two Creations exist.

Ancient Egypt goes Genesis several times better. There are at least four significantly different Egyptian versions of Creation, some with overlapping details and characters. Each of these Creation stories was connected to a prominent Egyptian city, and each emerged at different times in Egypt’s long history. Just as the two Creation stories in Genesis reflect different writers working at different times, the various Egyptian Creation accounts developed over the immense prehistoric time frame that has to be reckoned with whenever talking about Egypt. Early in its history, Egypt had been divided into forty-two separate administrative districts called
nomes
, and each had its own deity. Every town or village also had a temple, often devoted to a localized god, so the number of Egyptian deities grew to the thousands over time.

Keeping this in mind helps to explain why the Egyptian Creation myths defy a simple, “logical” narrative. These are stories that go back to the most distant moments of early human civilization, and then evolve and change over the course of centuries. While some details differ in these various Egyptian Creation stories, there are similarities and recurring characters. All share a central belief that the sun—or more precisely, a sun god—was at the center of the creation, which emerged from a primeval watery chaos called
Nun
, an endless, formless deep that existed at the beginning of time and was the source of the Nile.

The primeval ocean of chaos that existed before the first gods came into being, these waters contained all of the potential for life, awaiting only the emergence of a creator. This watery creation provides an intriguing parallel to the opening lines of the Bible—“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”

Probably the oldest version of Egyptian Creation myth came from Memphis, the ancient political capital of Egypt. Memphis is the city’s Greek name. The original Egyptian name is translated as “White Walls” and referred to the enclosure around the sacred city. Here, the belief held that the world was created by a very old creator god called
Ptah
, temples to whom were built all over Egypt. Most scholars believe that the Greeks translated the Egyptian word
Hewet-ka-Ptah
, which literally means “Temple of the Spirit of Ptah,” as
Aeguptos
, and it was eventually transformed into the word we now use as
Egypt
.

A patron of craftsmen, Ptah was able to create the world simply by thought and word alone—” through his heart and through his tongue,” as ancient priestly writings put it. Simply by speaking a string of names, Ptah produced all of Egypt, the other gods, including the sun god
Atum
(see below), the cities and temples. In other words, this Creation story was similar to the much later biblical Creation in Genesis 1, in which the Hebrew God speaks and creates the universe. (“God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”) For centuries, scholars have speculated and argued about whether the parallels between the Egyptian and Hebrew Creation accounts are just coincidence or whether the Egyptian Creation stories could have influenced the ancient Hebrews. It is an unanswered, and possibly unanswerable, question.

Manifested by the sacred Apis bull in Memphis, the most important of all sacred animals in Egypt, Ptah was seen as a creator deity, and Egyptian kings were crowned in his temple. But Ptah never rose to become Egypt’s supreme god and, at a later time, Ptah was merged with other gods to become a god of the dead. The Greeks later equated Ptah with their blacksmith god Hephaestus, known by the Romans as Vulcan. In another minor myth, Ptah was given credit for the miraculous defeat of an Assyrian army when he instructed an army of rats to gnaw through the attackers’ bowstrings and the leather on their shields, forcing them to retreat. One of the most recognizable representations of Ptah is a small gilded statue found in the tomb of Tutankhamun.

A second major Egyptian Creation story came from Hermopolis, farther south in central Egypt, a prosperous city built in honor of the god known as
Thoth
. This god of wisdom and transmitter of knowledge is credited with the invention of writing. The ancient Egyptian name of this city was Khemnu, and Hermopolis was its later Greek name, because the Greeks associated Thoth with their god Hermes. But in ancient Egyptian, Khemnu means “Eight Town,” and the myth that developed here held that four couples of frog-headed gods and snake-headed goddesses—technically referred to as the Ogdoad, or Group of Eight—were created by Thoth as the different aspects of the universe.
Nun
and his consort
Naunet
personified the original formless waters;
Heh
and
Hauhet
symbolized either Infinity or the force of the Nile floodwaters;
Kek
and
Kauket
embodied darkness;
Amun
and
Amaunet
were the incarnation of hidden power and were also associated with the wind and air.

While the specific details of how this Creation actually takes place are obscure, Thoth was credited as having commanded the Creation, and somehow the eight gods he produced were then responsible for the creation of the sun. In a variant of this myth, a lotus blossom arose from the waters, and from this flower, the young sun god emerged, bringing light and life into the cosmos. After this Creation, six of the gods receded from view, and only Amun and Amaunet joined the other gods of Egypt and continued to play an active role in Egyptian life.

A third Creation story focuses on the making of humans—an aspect of the Creation that is less significant in other Egyptian Creation accounts. This story features the god
Khnum,
an ancient ram-headed creator god who originated in Elephantine, an island in the Nile just above the first cataract at Aswan. In a highly folkloric tale, Khnum made humans by molding people on a potter’s wheel, providing the first real link between gods and humans in Egyptian myth. The depiction of Khnum seated at the potter’s wheel became a popular motif in Egyptian art. Khnum was especially significant because he controlled the Nile’s floodwaters. The inundation of the fields, which produced the grain that allowed Egypt to prosper, was one of the most important aspects of Egyptian life, and Khnum was considered a great fertility god.

The most significant Creation story in ancient Egypt, however, was the one associated with Heliopolis, as Herodotus called it, for it was the City of the Sun (
helio
is Greek for “sun”). One of the most important locations in ancient Egypt, its ruins are near modern Cairo. Sometime around 3000 BCE, near the time of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, a Creation account emerged in Heliopolis that became the dominant myth in Egyptian religion and history. This account is prominent in the Pyramid Texts, the collection of hieroglyphic writings found in some of the earliest tombs.

According to the Heliopolis myth, there was the great infinite ocean, described as a primeval being called Nu or Nun. At the beginning of time, the god Atum, “lord of the Heliopolis,” father and ruler of all the gods, emerged from these primeval waters. As the sun god, Atum simply came into being and stood on a raised mound—a symbolic representation of the land that rises out of the receding Nile floodwaters. In other words, the essence of Egypt—the sun and water—were merged into this one god. The mound became known as the
benben
, a pyramid-shaped elevation on which the sun god stood. In a temple in Heliopolis, there was a rock, possibly a meteorite, which was venerated as the
benben
stone and was believed to be the solidified semen of Atum. The
benben
stone, the primeval mound from which creation emerged, is considered the inspiration for both the pyramids and the obelisk.

A god of totality and complete power, Atum immediately began to create other gods. (In later times, Atum was linked with the other major Egyptian sun god,
Re
or
Ra
, as Re-Atum. See below.) This is where the story gets tricky, because there are a couple of variations. Clearly, his first act is to masturbate, and by doing so, Atum gives spontaneous birth to his children, the twins
Shu
and
Tefnut.
But in a later passage, Atum is said to “swallow his seed” and then “sneeze” and “spit up” these twins. Shu is the god of air, and Tefnut the lion-headed goddess of moisture. With their creation, there now exists the sun, water, and the atmosphere. The Creation goes on from there, until there is a collection of the most significant gods in Egypt—the nine deities known as the Great Ennead.